In Dream Machines, Nelson pitched the idea of Xanadu information franchises, where data shoppers could access material from the global storage system. This pitch for what he called the Xanadu Stands included a sketch of the interior, complete with snack bar, and the lyrics for a Xanadu singing commercial:

The greatest things you've ever seen
Dance your wishes on the screen
All the things that man has known
Comin' on the telephone -
Poems, books and pictures too
Comin' on the Xanadu.

The Xanadu franchises were silly, but they contained a solution to a genuinely difficult problem. If there was to be a universal library of electronic documents, who would pay for it? Nelson's answer was to imagine a corporate information entity that resembled McDonald's, a chain of franchises whose operating costs were paid by their individual owners out of revenue from the information-starved masses.

"The franchisee," wrote Nelson cheerfully, "has to put up the money for the computers, the scopes, the adorable purple enamel building, the johns, and so on; as a Xanadu franchisee he gets the whole turnkey system and certain responsibilities in the overall Xanadu network - of which he is a member." Nelson hinted that this system, the software on which the structure of the fantasy was to rest, was nearly complete.

Computer Lib was written as a popular primer, but its most profound effect was on computer programmers, who needed little persuasion about the value of computers. Its tone - energetic, optimistic, inexhaustible, confused - matched theirs exactly. Having set out to appeal to the general public, Nelson managed to publish an insider's bible and highly intimate guide to hacker culture.

What most touched the hackers who read Computer Lib was not the instructions on how to write a program loop in APL but something more radical. Computer Lib assigned to programmers a noble role in the battle for humanity's future, and it recruited them for the rebellion they were witnessing on their college campuses. When programmers read Computer Lib, they could discern a portrait of the book's ideal reader - an anxious, skeptical, interested, sensible, free-thinking citizen who wanted better digital tools. At the time of Computer Lib, this popular audience for news about the digital revolution did not exist. But the people to whom Computer Lib became a bible wished that this audience existed. Computer Lib reflected back to computer programmers an idealized image of themselves. In this sense, it was a far subtler book than Nelson set out to write.

Roger Gregory, Ted Nelson's most loyal collaborator, is a sad man. He suffers from a common, disabling ailment that Abraham Lincoln, who was similarly afflicted, called "the hypos." His sadness grows so acute at times that he becomes incapable of working, and his fits of black sorrow go back many, many years.

When he first heard of Ted Nelson, Gregory was a science fiction fan working in a used-computer store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called Neuman Computer Exchange. He had stringy hair and wore dirty clothes, and he tended to argue violently with people he felt were wrong. His job was annoying because he never got to play with any functioning "toys" - the refrigerator-size cabinets that contained the latest digital machinery. As soon as Gregory got some hopelessly wrecked piece of computer equipment into decent condition, Al Neuman, his boss, would sell it off. Gregory did his hacking in various computer labs associated with the University of Michigan, and he belonged to a social group - the Ann Arbor Computing Club - whose membership overlapped with the local science fiction
club.